Cisco Secure Firewall Review
June 12, 2024
Cisco Secure Firewall Review
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Firepower 1140
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Secure Firewall
We have various access policies that we use for all DMZs. It also terminates our IP check tunnels to regional hospitals in our area that are used obviously for healthcare purposes. Those are the biggies that we use it for.
Pros
- It's been a big change for us because like I said, we've been using it about a year, I think. And we went from ASAs to this, so it was a big changeover from being able to do everything in CLI honestly, it's a bit clunky and more time consuming to have to configure things through the Gooey, which has been a pain point for us. But we've tried to automate as much as we can. What it does well is the analysis. The event, not event viewer, but unified event, that's what it is. Handy tool. Also the tunnel troubleshooting the site to site tunnel monitoring or troubleshooting, I can't remember what it's called. It's pretty good too. It's nice how it has some predefined commands in there. I'd say those are probably the things we like about it the most.
Cons
- A couple of things pop into my mind right away. We've had some pain points with CPU usage and actually have gone through the, it's not professional services, I can't remember what it's called now, but talking to them, trying to optimize things, haven't had a lot of luck with that right now. It's mostly been system when it's not service effecting, but it's just more of an annoyance for us. Another one, and it's a very trivial thing, but it's just a little bit of a pain or an annoyance is the windows, the popup windows, even though it looks like you can resize them, you can't resize them, which is super annoying. Having to scroll in 'em, the pages, not being able to change how many things are displayed on a page is a bit annoying. And having to scroll through pages on the plus side, the filtering is, helps offset that. But still just little annoying things. Yeah, I can't think of anything else that really is a pain point.
- I think it's had positive, I dunno how that was worded, in fact, return of investment because just the ability to be able to troubleshoot things well with unified events has been a time saver. It's a lot more detailed than our old firewalls were. So it's easier to find where things are being blocked or what's causing an issue. So I think in that case it's really helped the tools on it comparable to what we had before. But again, it's very helpful in troubleshooting. So I think it's been positive.
Well, we're healthcare, so obviously privacy and just securing that and because it's a big target for ransomware and any viruses, whatever, malware, just trying to protect not only the data itself, but also the hospitals and their being able to just take care of people. If there's a big ransomware outbreak, it shuts everything down and people suffer because they can't get to appointments, they can't have surgeries, that sort of thing. So it's very important to secure it.
I think the biggest thing for us was because we've always used Cisco firewalls, we were definitely biased to just keep going in that direction because interoperability with what we already have, because we're all Cisco everywhere, what we were used to do, which ended up not being the case because it's so different than what we had before. But truth be told, I think, I don't know that we would've made the same decision again had we explored others because we've heard good things about other ones as well. And maybe after a few years of using it, we'll think differently, but for now it's still getting used to it.
Just the ASAs before this. That's the only other. Select functionality wise. It's comparable, obviously because it's a replacement for it, but again, it's just getting used to the new user interface and the new way of doing things.
Do you think Cisco Secure Firewall delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Cisco Secure Firewall's feature set?
Yes
Did Cisco Secure Firewall live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Cisco Secure Firewall go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Cisco Secure Firewall again?
Yes
Comments
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